Beards, Booze and Blues: The Hitchhikers' Guide

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In Death Us Do Join

While the word mourns/gets angry about the atrocities in Paris I am going to focus on the passing of a respected English actor: Warren Mitchell, famous for the playing satirical bigot Alf Garnett.
Now I haven’t seen a lot of Till Death Us Do Part/In Sickness and in Health as they aren’t repeated very often due to the fact a lot of people missed the point. I do know it was remade in the USA as All In the Family, that it frequently got in trouble with TV watchdogs and introduced the term “you silly moo.”

But Warren was a versatile actor and a life long socialist and it is ironic he is associated as the bigot. He guested in several episodes of Danger Man (once in blackface) and was in four episodes of the Avengers, twice as the same character. His best episode from a performance PoV is the Golden Fleece in which he plays a solider who is smuggling gold but turning it into bullets. He is very much in command and avoids the camper of his later episodes and the episode has a good twist.

Now his later role Brodny was a 2D character who treads the line between funny and annoying. He is better in Two’s a Crowd then See – Through Man. But my favourite role of his was in the Hancock’s Half Hour episode Bill & Father Christmas where he plays a doctor who has to console Bill Kerr when he discovers there is no Father Christmas and Sid James has been using Hancock to pretend to Santa over the years.

He was also a big fan of Jazz and hosted a documentary on Sidney Bechet.